{"ID":2864448,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24063","arxiv_id":"2509.24063","title":"TeraAgent: A Distributed Agent-Based Simulation Engine for Simulating Half a Trillion Agents","abstract":"Agent-based simulation is an indispensable paradigm for studying complex systems. These systems can comprise billions of agents, requiring the computing resources of multiple servers to simulate. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art platform, BioDynaMo, does not scale out across servers due to its shared-memory-based implementation. To overcome this key limitation, we introduce TeraAgent, a distributed agent-based simulation engine. A critical challenge in distributed execution is the exchange of agent information across servers, which we identify as a major performance bottleneck. We propose two solutions: 1) a tailored serialization mechanism that allows agents to be accessed and mutated directly from the receive buffer, and 2) leveraging the iterative nature of agent-based simulations to reduce data transfer with delta encoding. Built on our solutions, TeraAgent enables extreme-scale simulations with half a trillion agents (an 84x improvement), reduces time-to-result with additional compute nodes, improves interoperability with third-party tools, and provides users with more hardware flexibility.","short_abstract":"Agent-based simulation is an indispensable paradigm for studying complex systems. These systems can comprise billions of agents, requiring the computing resources of multiple servers to simulate. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art platform, BioDynaMo, does not scale out across servers due to its shared-memory-based im...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24063","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24063v1","authors":"[\"Lukas Breitwieser\",\"Ahmad Hesam\",\"Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı\",\"Mohammad Sadrosadati\",\"Fons Rademakers\",\"Onur Mutlu\"]","published":"2025-09-28T20:35:29Z","proceeding":"cs.DC","tasks":"[\"cs.DC\",\"cs.CE\",\"cs.MA\",\"cs.PF\",\"q-bio.QM\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}